Chapter 10

CALLIE HAD DREADED going back to school, but when the summer term started, Lewis seemed to have been converted by the glories of Easter, because he left Callie alone and did not bully her.

She watched him from a distance. He was strangely quiet. He did not make a dead set for the new, younger ones, as he usually did, twisting their arms to see if they would cry, knocking into them in the cafeteria to make them drop their food.

‘School isn’t so bad,’ Callie told Anna. ‘Perhaps I will stay.’

‘Take the scholarship exam anyway.’ Anna was used to Callie’s frequent changes of mind. Tomorrow school might be no good again.

But tomorrow, Callie actually had a conversation with Lewis the Louse.

They were in the library, where you were not supposed to talk, but they were behind a stack of shelves and Mrs Dooley was busy at the far desk.

Lewis had taken down a book and opened it, but he did not seem able to read. Callie was searching for something in an index. She was aware that Lewis was watching her, so she looked up and smiled nervously.

To her amazement, he smiled back, his lower lip hanging on his face like a hammock, his teeth as pointed as his father’s, but with gaps from fighting.

‘What you do in the holidays then?’ he asked.

Callie was so surprised and flummoxed that she could not think of anything.

‘Oh – nothing much. I rode. I worked most of the time in the stables. I helped Steve build a gate.’

‘Who’s Steve?’

‘The boy who works at the farm.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Lewis nodded, remembering.

‘He did a marvellous thing.’ Callie babbled on, making the most of the chance to get on the right side of the Louse. ‘He foiled a woman.’

‘Foiled?’ Lewis’s mouth hung. His vocabulary was not very large.

Callie told him about the woman letting out David and then ringing the police. He listened, his slow dull eyes following the movement of her face, breathing through his mouth like a patient under anaesthetic.

‘Who’s talking there?’ Mrs Dooley came round the end of the bookshelves. Lewis had disappeared. There was only Callie there to take a discipline mark.

Two nights later, the door of the Mongolian horse’s loose box was open, and Trotsky wandered across a field of young wheat, eating it as he went and occasionally lying down for a crushing roll.

‘Good thing he didn’t have shoes on,’ the Colonel said nervously to the farmer.

‘Good thing I wasn’t out there with a gun,’ the farmer said grimly.

Trotsky was wily enough to undo a latch if the bolts were not fastened.

‘But I know I bolted Trot’s door,’ Dora said. ‘And the bottom bolt too, because he bit me while I was bending down.’

‘Someone opened it then,’ Steve said. ‘Like the Jordans’ neighbour.’

Callie kept her mouth shut, which was how she should have kept it behind the library shelves. Was it possible that she had put this idea for new trouble into the Louse’s thick head?

He left her alone. She told her mother that she was definitely not going to take the exam. But when Lewis saw she was off her guard, he invited her one day to go with him and buy a chocolate cornet before it was time for her bus.

She went. They never got to the ice-cream van. As soon as they were round the corner from the school, Lewis pulled her into the overgrown garden of an empty house and knocked her backwards into the bushes. She picked herself up and was going to run away, but he grabbed her.

‘That’s just the beginning.’ He stared at her with his horrid revolting slab of face.

‘What for?’

‘Stopping us getting a licence.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your stepfather. The Sergeant, the Bosun, whatever his daft name is. He done it.’

‘It was nothing to do with the Colonel. He only sent the County Council a report on your stable.’

‘He wouldn’t know one end of a stable from the other.’ Lewis was gripping her arm so hard that she would scream if it went on. ‘Much less a horse.’

‘Let me go!’

‘He’s got it in for us. Trying to keep an honest man from earning a crust of bread, my dad says. We’ve lost a lot of bookings, you know.’ His gorilla brow came down threateningly. ‘People come to us for the riding.’

‘Why don’t you clean the place up and apply for another licence?’ Callie bit her lip. Her arm was going numb. She would not scream.

‘There’s nothing wrong with our place,’ Lewis growled. ‘It’s your stepfather, that’s who there’s something wrong with. We’d ought to put him out of business too. Perhaps we will. Yeah.’ He dropped her arm, frowning under the weight of what passed for thoughts. ‘Perhaps we will. My dad says it’s a crime to keep them poor old horses alive against their will.’

‘It’s not against their will!’ Callie could have run now, but she stayed to argue, rubbing her arm. ‘They’re all fit enough to enjoy life. The Colonel says it’s wrong to take life from an animal while he can still use it.’

‘A crime against Nature.’ The Louse was obviously echoing his father. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed.’

‘We save horses! We saved your horse because you were all too cruel and stupid—’

Lewis pulled back his arm and took an open-handed swipe at her, and she ran, ducking through the bushes until she was out on the road where there were people.

When she got home, she kept her sleeve down over her bruised arm and explained her scratches by telling her mother that she had got off the bus half-way up the hill for exercise, and taken a short cut through the brambles.

She told the Colonel that the Pinecrest Hotel had been refused a licence to run a riding stable.

‘Thank God,’ the Colonel said. ‘There is some sense to the Town Hall after all.’

‘I’ll bet they wish they could put you out of business too.’ Callie watched his face to see how he would take that.

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ In spite of all the cruelty and ignorance he had seen in his work for horses, the Colonel still believed the best of people, right up to the time when he discovered the worst.

‘And I’ve decided,’ Callie told Anna and the Colonel – the pain of her arm kept reminding her – ‘that I do want to go away to that school.’

‘Your name’s still on the exam list,’ Anna said. ‘I didn’t keep asking Miss Crombie to take it off every time you changed your mind.’

‘Suppose I don’t get the scholarship?’

‘Miss Crombie thinks you have a very good chance.’